The Email Marketing Show

Do you use a single customer avatar in your business? Today we're sharing what we really think about customer avatars, why they don't work, and what you want to use instead. If you think (or have been led to believe) that customer avatars are the end-all and be-all, you seriously need to find out about this instead! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:16) Want to make your sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(4:14) You can't create a customer avatar before you have an audience.(6:24) An educated guess is NOT a customer avatar. (7:19) Create a business you actually like.(8:22) Who is our audience made up of?(10:00) Introducing the idea of segmentation.(11:58) Create Dynamic Customer Journeys. (14:14) No business is sustainable with only ONE avatar.(16:04) Segmentation doesn't need to be overwhelming.(18:08) Subject line of the week.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. You can't create a customer avatar before you have an audienceThe idea of customer avatars has been around for a long time. In fact, it's often the first module of every marketing course you’ll ever take. And apparently, it's all about getting a piece of paper, thinking about a customer avatar, and giving it a name. Is it, though? Because by the end of this exercise you can't be sure whether your avatar is true or you've made things up!So if like us, you find this idea or task really hard and demotivating, you'll be pleased to know that creating a customer avatar is something you can do retrospectively when you already have an audience. It’s impossible to create a customer avatar before you have an audience. Because all you're doing then it's guessing! There. We said it. An educated guess is NOT a customer avatarAnd sure - you can make educated guesses. If you teach long-distance running, you're going to know certain things about your audience. Maybe you only teach men, so you'll know your clients will be men and probably in a certain age bracket.That's an educated guess. But it's not a full customer avatar. And it's not going to be useful information when you're starting a business and trying to figure things out. So creating a customer avatar is something you do once you already have an audience. Otherwise, you're probably going to be paralysed by the details around what colour hair your ideal client has! And does it even matter? No, it doesn’t.Create a business you actually likeCreating a customer avatar and sticking with it at all costs also means you might end up with an audience you don’t like. The people you're intending to serve might be profitable, but you may not like them very much. So what we do instead is to put our products on the Internet (we know they're good) and then see who resonates with them. In turn, this might then give you an idea of what your market might be. For example, we knew we wanted to sell to people who create courses, memberships, and coaching on the Internet – in other words, small businesses. We’re not selling to big corporations - we know that. Sure, if any stumble across our http://www.gulfportpharmacy.com products, that’s fine. But that’s not who we’re going for.And we definitely didn't refine our audience and customer avatar to the point of establishing whether they were men or women and what market they were in. Instead, we started putting content on the Internet that was aimed at anyone who’s ever thought about selling a course – content that would appeal to somebody. And then we started paying attention to who it appealed to.Who is our audience made up of?So, retrospectively, we now know that most of our audience falls into these categories. Most of them are:Female. Between the ages of 35-55.Married with kids.In the US, the UK, Australia, and Canada.And they're experts in what they do. That's mainly who we're talking to. But we didn't choose to appeal to women. We run ads to everyone, and women responded more. We do training and events for communities of men and women, and women responded more. Having said that, we also have customers who don’t fall into any of these categories. And that’s where the idea of a customer avatar falls over. Because we can’t say we’re only going to sell to these people. So instead, we're putting out content and drawing in who's naturally interested and alienating who isn't. Doing this is going to save you time and help you create a business you like.Rob, for example, used to do a radio show for a local station, and their listener avatar was a 35-year-old housewife called Jane. Every meeting was structured around what Jane would want and like. But that doesn’t mean that what Jane likes is what you like and want to create. So create what you want and let that draw in the audience who are naturally drawn to you.Introducing the idea of segmentationAnother thing that’s worth remembering is that we're all individuals. Just like Kennedy’s dad used to say, “Labels are for tins.” We don’t have to label everything. So, rather than creating content that appeals to just one customer avatar and alienates people who'd be amazing customers for you, what you want to do is to find out what category your customers fall into and send them different emails. In other words, you want to make sure you’re routing people down different paths based on who they are and what they’re doing. And this is where we look at segmenting.For example, when somebody comes into our business, one of the first things we do is to find out a bit more about them. If we were teaching fitness, for example, we’d want to know if they’re male or female, what age they are, and what their goals are. Once we know all that, we can send these people through different paths.And sometimes you'll bring in people who you can't help, and that's okay - it happens in all businesses. But this also means that you get to serve the people you bring in in the best possible way.We have a couple of episodes on segmentation, so if you're interested in this topic, go check them out: 6 Techniques To Segment Your Email Subscribers. When is it too early to segment your email subscribers? Create Dynamic Customer JourneysWhat we do instead of using customer avatars in our business is to create what we call Dynamic Customer Journeys. This means creating forks in the road, or points at which people get to choose other crossroads.And there's a simple way to do this - you ask people what situation they're currently in. And they let you know by clicking a link, replying to an email, completing a survey, or filling out a poll.Once you know what category they fall into and what problem they currently need help with, you show them content that helps them in that situation. So even if someone decides to go down one route right now and then chooses a different one later, you'll be able to create a unique journey for that person.Because you're collecting data about your customers, when you're about to send an email about a new offer, you'll first need to decide which category of people needs to hear about it. There will be people who definitely don’t need to hear about it, so include the ones who do and exclude those who don't. That way, everyone’s getting the perfect message for them because they’re on a Dynamic Customer Journey.And by doing this, you also increase engagement because people will get content that's relevant to them. And we all know we disengage from something if we feel it's not relevant! No business is sustainable with only ONE customer avatarOne of the members of The League, Hillary-Marie, teaches tap dancing to people who want to learn and to instructors who teach tap dancing themselves. So she has two different categories. Had she gone down the customer avatar route and chosen just the one, things wouldn't have worked out as well as they did for her business.Because different categories are interested in different types of content, she can draw them all in through segmentation and say what she needs to say to different people. Also, among the people who are learning to tap dance, there are different levels - from the beginners to the advanced crowd who are looking for mastery and refinement. There will also be local people who are interested in an in-person class and others who will want to consume online content instead. This proves that no business is sustainably global with one customer avatar – you need different profiles (with different nuances) to sell to. If you think about the fact that Facebook collects 52,000 data points on every single person, that tells you that trying to shoehorn everybody into one category (or customer avatar) doesn't work. So put content on the Internet that you're interested in and build a business you like with the people you like working with.Segmentation doesn't need to be overwhelmingSegmentation sounds overwhelming, but it’s really simple. It's about collecting data about your customers, and it means that every time you want to send an email or launch a new sequence or a programme, you'll know which people to get in front of because they're interested in buying. All you need to do at that point is to find the people on your list that meet the right criteria (based on the data points you’ve collected) and only email them. So rather than customer avatars, think about Dynamic Customer Journeys. Involve the people who check all the boxes and exclude the ones who don't. If you want more information on this, we have a couple of cool resources inside our membership, The League. We go in-depth on how to create Dynamic Customer Journeys for small businesses, just like us (and you don't need big teams of data people for this to work). One of the resources is called Survey Funnels, and it teaches you interesting and innovative ways of using surveys.Plus, we give you campaigns for you to copy and paste and deploy for yourself. Some of them use segmentation to make sure you're only targeting the people who are most likely to buy. So check out The League if you aren’t already a member. And if you are, go and get stuck in! Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “I forgot to tell you…” This has a couple of things going for it. First of all, it has curiosity built into it. What did you forget to tell me? And why is it important?But also, it doesn't look like a marketing email. If you scan through your inbox, you’ll notice that most subject lines sent from your friends and family are very bland and straight to the point because most people don't think too much about them. They'll just take a few words that relate to what the email is about and move on. The marketing ones, on the other hand, tend to be more catchy and interesting.  So sending something like this helps you cut through the noise of all the marketing – it’s direct and grabs people’s attention because it could be coming from their friends and family. Plus, it has a bit of curiosity added on. Try it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodes6 Techniques To Segment Your Email Subscribers.When Is It Too Early to Segment Your Email Subscribers?Advanced Psychology: Using Compound Curiosity.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. Join our FREE Facebook groupIf you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The League MembershipNot sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about why you can't just have one customer avatar and what you need instead) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

Do you believe that marketing is storytelling? What does comedy have to do with email marketing? Can it teach us something we can use in our email marketing to deepen the connection with our audience? Copy Chief Kevin Rogers blows our minds with his unique formula for sharing your origin story in 60 seconds or less. Warning: if you're not into having fits of laughter or don't want to hear Kennedy talk about polar bear hunting in Norway while learning one of the most amazing marketing tricks ever, this episode isn't for you.SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:09) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(2:44) Did Kevin really see the Rolling Stones perform in a little intimate concert gig?(3:56) Does your origin story matter?(5:13) Is your origin story really about you?(7:44) Make your origin story about the problem you solve. (9:15) Introducing the 60-second Sale Hook.(14:21) The 60-seconds Sales Hook formula in marketing. (16:25) Using different angles in your origin story.(18:47) Where does your origin story fit in your marketing?(22:16) Subject line of the week with Kevin Rogers.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. Does your origin story matter? Should you share your origin story? Do people even care? Kevin Rogers tells us that our audience cares about our origin story more than we think! Just because we've heard it or shared it a million times, and we now think it's irrelevant, it's far from it! As marketers, we need to share our origin stories, go deep into them, and find different angles and places to tell them (or different parts of them). Marketing is storytelling, so this is crucial! Is your origin story really about you? We've all heard that your marketing and copy always have to be about the customer and not about you. So how do you strike this balance between telling your story and making it interesting and relevant to your audience? When you're writing copy, imagine almost having a two-way conversation with your audience. You hold one side of it and can almost picture your readers nodding along on the other side. Focus on the thoughts they'll have about themselves as they’re reading. If you're sharing things that are relatable, people will inject themselves into the story.Use a lot of “you” to make your copy about your readers, but there are plenty of ways you can involve your readers while telling your own story and not have people think you're some egocentric jerk who can’t think of anyone else. If the story is done right, no one will think that.  Take the famous sitcom Friends, for example. People laugh at the jokes because they imagine themselves in the situations the characters are experiencing. We laugh because we live vicariously through the characters. And that's what a good origin story is about - this shared feeling is what makes us want to create and tell our own stories. It's the heartbeat of every communication.Make your origin story about the problem you solveKevin explains that in marketing you have to make the origin story relevant to the problem you help people solve. If you’re selling a product, it makes people’s lives better. However, your audience may or may not experience this particular problem as something urgent right now. So part of the job your marketing needs to do is to ramp up that urgency.By sharing your origin story you can bond with your best prospects and turn away people who might not be a good fit. Especially when it comes to social media ads, you don’t want to attract people who are never going to buy your products or services. So what you want is a well-done, 60-second Hero Journey – one that you can share in one minute or less.And to create that, you need to make sure your origin story isn't just about you - it needs to relate to the problem you're solving. It's also worth pointing out that if you have multiple businesses and wear multiple hats, you may think you only have one origin story. But that's not necessarily true - you can choose which bits to highlight and hone in to make it relevant to a particular market.Introducing the 60-second Sales HookThanks to his background as a stand-up comedian, Kevin has created the 60-second Sales Hook - a formula to help you craft your origin story. Kevin adapted a joke formula to create this. And he did it when he realised that as a marketer, you have the same task a comedian has. When a comedian first comes up on stage, the stakes are high because they only have a few minutes to establish their persona. And their first joke is going to set the tone for the rest of the set. So they need to make it relatable and memorable, just like we all need to do with anything we produce in our marketing. So Kevin picked up on this widely recogniseable formula that stand-up comedians use to establish their persona. He broke it down and realised that with a small tweak to the last element of the formula, you can use it in your marketing. Why the tweak? Because unlike in comedy, in marketing you're not trying to make people laugh - you're trying to help people learn they can trust you to help them solve their problem.The joke formula in comedySo here's the joke formula Kevin identified and shared with us:Identity.Struggle. Discovery. And surprise, which is what makes people laugh. One of Kevin’s favourite opening jokes on a national TV spot is from a comedian named Karen Ronkowski. She opened with this joke where she said that her kids were so bad in Walmart that she pulled a flyswatter off the shelves and smacked them with it. And as soon as she did that, she realised she doesn’t have kids!It’s a great joke, and in only a few seconds she tells so much about herself (that's the identity element of the joke). We know she's annoyed by children, and she's willing to beat them (that's the struggle). The discovery is the flyswatter, and at the end, you have the surprise, which is that she isn't beating her own kids!Plus, when it comes to identity, she talks about going to Walmart, and just from that fact you're getting a lot of information about the type of person she is. In a few seconds, she also manages to identify with and relate to the mums or parents in the audience. Setting the joke in Walmart also adds specificity. We imagine what the store looks like, for example, and this drives the story and makes it three-dimensional. This works in comedy and in marketing copy too!The 60-second Sales Hook formula in marketingObviously in marketing, we’re not trying to get people to laugh – that’s not the goal. The goal is to build trust. So to use the joke formula in our marketing, we change the last part from surprise to result. What is the result that you have helped other people achieve through your discovery?The formula for marketing is:Identity.Struggle.Discovery.Result.Once you know these four elements of your business, you can write a story on the spot. Kevin’s story, for example, is that he’s a former stand-up comedian who turned copywriter (identity). For years, he struggled with sharing his story in a way that was relevant to people (struggle). Then he discovered how he could take a joke formula and change the last element of it and turn it into a hook formula (discovery). And he has since grown his business by 50% (result). All you have to do now is to add a call to action. So for Kevin, it's something along the lines of: “To see this joke formula that I turned into a marketing formula, click the link below, and I’ll give you my free book”. So that’s super quick. And it's pretty cool, right?Kevin also pointed out that once you know about this formula, you'll start seeing it everywhere - from TV commercials to ad campaigns. It's a proven, go-to formula - try it out! Using different angles of your origin storyAs mentioned earlier, if you have more than one business, you can also use your origin story in different ways. If Kevin had a business around health, for example, he'd share that he’s a father and a husband from St. Petersburg, Florida (identity). And that a few years ago, he developed a blood infection that almost killed him, so he had open-heart surgery to have his valve replaced (struggle). Note how the specificity around his identity allows you to tap into what’s subconsciously relevant to your audience. The fact that Kevin is a comedian-turned-copywriter is interesting to the marketing crowd. But if you’re talking about health and survival, then you can drop that fact because other things, like mentioning that Kevin is a husband and a father have a lot more connotations. That straight away tells you Kevin wants to see his children grow up, get married, and have their own children one day.Another tip is to always pre-empty the questions your audience may be asking in their heads. So if you mention a movie, share the title. If you’re talking about your girlfriend, give her a name.Going back to Kevin's story, the discovery is that the surgeons saved his life, but the medicine they prescribed was killing him all over again. Eventually, he discovered a way he could naturally fix those same problems without prescription medication. And on it goes. So you can use this formula for different things, and it's fun! Where does your origin story fit in your marketing?According to Kevin, the best place to use an origin story is when you first invite somebody into your world with a free download or a lead magnet offer. You want congruence from the beginning. So don’t think that because you said something on one page you can’t say it again - you absolutely can because these people just met you!You don't want to make something up just to get a click – you want to build trust. And people want to know they’re in the right place. For example, you can use your origin story in your pitch for your free download, and then on the Thank You page, you can have a short video where you tell the full story. You can tweak it slightly, make it longer, and add details that are relevant to the sale along the way.This is a useful framework that is best used if you have 60 seconds or less to tell someone who you are, why they should care, and why they should want what you have. So use it to grab their attention on the landing page or in an ad – it’s a quick summary to grab their attention and hook them in, and then you can unpack the story later. You can even build the story up over time (for example, over several emails in your welcome sequence) so your audience feels like they’re going somewhere with you, and that relationship deepens.In other words, build trust through congruence. Reassure people they're in the right place, and when you know they're interested (because they're clicking), tell them more and further that relationship. And don't forget you can do this with imagery too - the images you share can support your words.Subject line of the week with Kevin RogersOne of Kevin's top-performing subject lines is “The night I quit comedy.” Why did this work? Because curiosity is really high here - it's hard to look away from a subject line like that. Whether people know about Kevin's background in comedy or not, in these 5 words they learn a lot. It's interesting, and it makes people want to know what happened.Plus, Kevin had a lot of fun with the story and later layered lots of lessons in there about knowing when something is over, choosing a new direction, and having the courage to go after it. And remember to start the story in the middle of the action because it’s the most intriguing place. Useful Episode ResourcesAbout KevinIf you want to find out more about Kevin you can find him on his website, where you can grab a free download of the 60-second Sales Hook and also find his podcast and other amazing resources.Related episodesMaking Yourself Choosable with Belinda Weaver.12 Things That We Use On Stage That Help Our Email Marketing.The Therapeutic Benefits of Writing Your Own Emails.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. Join our FREE Facebook groupIf you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The League MembershipNot sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how marketing is storytelling and how to tell your origin story) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

Want to know how to create clever subject lines for emails that will get you more clicks and sales? Then you need to find out about this advanced psychological strategy called compound curiosity. That's right - it's not just curiosity the way you may have been taught before. This will quite literally blow your mind! Ready to learn how to do it? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:10) Want to make your sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(3:31) Introducing our new sponsor - Selzy.(5:01) How does curiosity work?(5:28) Where to use curiosity in your email marketing.(6:18) What is the difference between curiosity and compound curiosity?(7:27) Examples of curiosity and compound curiosity.(8:38) How to create your own subject lines using compound curiosity.(10:55) Other ways to implement compound curiosity.(12:43) Introducing our course Subject Lines that Drive Sales.(13:30) Subject line of the week.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. Introducing our new sponsor - SelzyFor every dollar you spend on email marketing, you’re supposed to make at least a $36 return. But that's hard to do if you're scratching your head wondering how to use all of these advanced email marketing features. This is why we're introducing Selzy, a tool where you don’t have to squint your eyes and give yourself a migraine to get started.You’ll be able to launch your first campaign in just 15 minutes, create emails and automations super easily, and if you need to, you can call for backup 24/7 from Selzy’s amazing support team. Selzy is sponsoring this episode of The Email Marketing Show, so if you want to give it a shot, for just $49 you can have a lifetime account with unlimited emails, automation, segmentation, and some advanced analytics. And that’s all of that for the price of around 10 lattes! You can grab this bonkers deal here.How does curiosity work? Curiosity is one of the most important elements you can use to get people to open your emails and click on the links inside them. Without curiosity, no one's going to open your emails, and that's simply because they're not curious enough to find out more! Curiosity is the emotion we use to get clicks and opens, and it's pretty much the only one that’s going to do that for you! So you want to lean into this psychological strategy to learn how to write clever subject lines for emails that get opened more and get you more clicks! Where to use curiosity in your email marketingSo where will you use curiosity? You can use curiosity in two places - your subject lines and the content of your email (the body copy). Curiosity in your subject lines drives people to open your emails and then click on your links. Because one of the things you want to do is to make sure you prompt people to take the next action with you but also inspire any potential actions after that. In other words, with your subject lines, you want to drive people to open and also be pre-framed to click to find out what's going on. The body copy of your emails needs to drive people to click on the links - that's the direct action you want people to take. But you also want them to be inspired to go forward and check out your products and buy.This is why we use curiosity in 80-90% of our subject lines, and out of those, probably half will use this psychological strategy we call compound curiosity. So let's see what the difference between the two is. What is the difference between curiosity and compound curiosity?The way most people deal with curiosity is by saying things like, “I’ve got a video for you to do X”. This is you listing all the benefits in the subject line. But compound curiosity looks more like, “In this video, you'll learn [benefit] and wait until you see what Kennedy is wearing at 2 minutes and 22 seconds!" We call it compound because you have one piece of curiosity added on top of another one.Why does this work? Because as a reader you know you're going to benefit from these emails. And benefits are important in the body copy because they explain what the thing you're selling or offering is doing for people. But then you also want to multiply and compound that curiosity (or that benefit) with some additional curiosity.Now, that doesn't mean you use this for everything - you definitely don't want to overuse this. But let's have a look at some examples of curiosity and compound curiosity in action. Examples of curiosity and compound curiosityHere are a couple of examples that trigger curiosity:“You’re doing it wrong.” People see this and wonder what they’re doing wrong.“It’s the summer of 2002.” And here people wonder what happened in the summer of 2002.This is what we refer to as normal curiosity, and you’ll probably already be familiar with that.  But here are some examples that use compound curiosity: “Arguing with a guru.” This is a real subject line we sent out and it’s compound curiosity because here the audience is wondering WHO the guru is and WHAT we were arguing about. Did we win? Or did they win?“Lessons from the milkman.” This is another real subject line we sent out. It's compound curiosity because someone may be wondering WHAT the lessons were and what we learnt from the milkman. Also, will they help the reader? What can one possibly learn from the milkman?How to create your own subject lines using compound curiositySo let's look at how you can also create clever subject lines for emails that use compound curiosity in a way that's subtle but powerful. The four examples we shared above might not sound all that different on the surface, but they are. And the subject lines that use compound curiosity have two elements of curiosity added in. That's key - you want two elements of curiosity in the subject line or the email copy you're writing. Think of this as questions that the reader might ask. Usually, these are going to be a WHO and a WHAT or a WHAT and a HOW. In other words, you’re looking to write subject lines that trigger two questions that start with two of these questioning words.So for example, with WHAT, one of the questions might be, “What happened?” With HOW the question might be, “How did that come about?” Or, "How did we get those lessons from the milkman?" And, "How are they relevant to your reader?" Or with WHO, the question could be, "Who is the guru?" When you trigger two questions in one subject line you subconsciously get under the skin of your subscribers. They want to know more and more desperately than they would if this was just a single-curiosity subject line. So the key to making compound curiosity work is to have two different questioning words. If you had a subject line that said, “It was the milkman and the cowboy” that doesn’t work as well because you have two WHO questions. Who’s the milkman and who’s the cowboy? It doesn’t add anything.But when you have two different questions, that’s when you have compound curiosity because they multiply each other rather than just adding to each other. You want multiple questions going off on people’s minds because that means people are giving your subject line more attention. It means they'll open the email to find out what's going on and make sense of it.Other ways to implement compound curiosityYou can also do this by reframing words. Here's an example of that from a subject line we sent out during the lockdown period that read, "What's in THIS box?” Using capital letters for the word THIS was an interesting choice. People want to know what’s in the box, but they're also curious to find out if there’s a picture of the box in the email. Are you going to tell me about the box? How do I know what the box is? There's double curiosity there. And as you get better and more practiced with creating subject lines that use compound curiosity, you can do what we do, which is to pull the story we're going to talk about in the email into the subject line. How? You write the email first, then go back to it and work out how much detail you can remove from the story to strip it down to 3-6 words and turn it into a subject line. And, of course, you want to phrase it in such a way that it triggers more than questions in people’s minds.This might sound complicated, but it comes with practice. The more you do it, the faster you'll get, and it’ll become very natural. So just go through the story in your email and think of different opportunities to inject a few questions into somebody’s mind with it.If you do this, you’ll end up with more people opening your emails and clicking the links. Remember that people are curious about different things, so give compound curiosity a try. It's an advanced psychological technique that will help you create clever subject lines for your emails that get them opened and make you sales. Introducing our course, Subject Lines that Drive SalesIf you want to check out our approach to creating psychologically impactful and clever subject lines for emails that drive clicks and sales using strategies like compound curiosity, we have something for you that doesn't rely on dusty old formulas.In fact, you'll notice we never give you formulas for your subject lines! We simply tell you what subject lines we use and then break down the psychology behind them to tell you why they work. We have a full course on this called Subject Lines that Drive Sales. It's available for free for all members of The League. So if you're not a member already, go and check it out!Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line uses compound curiosity and proves how short (yet effective) subject lines can be. It’s just three words, and it’s “My dirty tactics.” People want to know WHAT the tactics are and WHY they are dirty. So it has in-built compound curiosity. Clever, right? Try it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow To Use Email Subject Lines To Do More Than Get Your Emails Opened.Writing Subject Lines Without Using Formulas.How To Write Email Subject Lines For Sales Emails (That Actually Work).FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. Join our FREE Facebook groupIf you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The League MembershipNot sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how to use compound curiosity to create clever subject lines for emails that will get you clicks and sales) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

What are the BEST email marketing strategies out there? Well, we have 7 strategies for you that shouldn't work, but they absolutely do!We're Kennedy and Carrie, and the things we're going to share might surprise you. But trust us, they work!Ready to get all the good stuff?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:33) Want to carry on with the conversation? Join our FREE Facebook group. (2:42) 1. Send more emails. (5:09) 2. Include one clear call to action in all your emails. (8:06) 3. Talk about yourself. (16:23) 4. Stop using benefit-driven subject lines. (17:53) 5. Send emails that 'divide' your audience. (26:20) 6. Share complaints or negative reviews. (30:00) 7. Send 'ugly' emails. (31:49) Join The Email Hero Blueprint. (32:17) Subject line of the week.Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesTurn Problems into Opportunities – Convert Haters into Sales with Laura Belgray from The Talking Shrimp.The Truth About All The Surprising Things That REALLY Impact Your Email Deliverability.Perfect Timing? What’s The BEST Time To Send An Email For Maximum Impact?FREE list to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. Here's a list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here.Join the FREE Facebook groupDo you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber? There's a way! Every business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. You'll find a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This content is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The Email Hero Blueprint Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.Want to connect with Carrie?You can find Carrie on her website!Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the 7 BEST email marketing strategies that shouldn't work but absolutely do) and love the show, we'd appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast.And please do tell us! What do you really fill your working days with if you don't spend time on email marketing? We'd love to know!

Falling off the email marketing wagon happens to the best of us. Whether life got busy, a launch took up your focus, or you just fell out of the habit - it happens. And if your list hasn’t heard from you in a while, it’s tempting to wait for the “perfect” moment to restart (eg. Monday, the start of the month, or some other arbitrary milestone) But the truth is, the best time to reconnect with your audience is today.In this episode, we’re diving into how to restart your email marketing without overthinking or worrying about upsetting your subscribers. (Plus, we’re giving you the exact framework for the perfect reintroduction email - we call it the ‘Terrible Friend’ Campaign)Let’s do this!Useful Episode ResourcesFREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. Join our FREE Facebook groupIf you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The Email Hero BlueprintWant more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the psychology of marketing and the 9 things we use in all our email campaigns) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

What do stage entertainment and email marketing have in common? As you may know, we are both from an entertainment background. Rob is a comedy hypnotist and Kennedy is a psychological mind reader (or mentalist). That means we spend a big chunk of our lives on stages using psychology to make people do certain things, to perform and entertain an audience, and make it funny, interesting, and engaging in the process. So today we're sharing 12 email marketing strategy examples from our on-stage careers that we use in our psychology-driven email marketing. Ready to find out how you can apply these 'tricks' to your email marketing? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (00:09) Want to make your sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(4:28) Train your audience and create authority.(9:54) Grab and keep people's attention.(12:27) Be yourself and surprise your audience.(16:49) Tell stories and create a setup & payoff situation.(21:03) Build beliefs.(21:38) Adjust and adapt the way you address people.(24:51) Find the most efficient way to do things.(27:08) Pay attention to language patterns.(28:58) Subject line of the week.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. 1. Train your audienceThe first strategy we'd like to share is training your audience. What do we mean by this? Well, this may sound strange, but when people go to an event for the first time, they don’t know how to behave. Can they interact with the host? Should they stand up or sit down? People have questions. So the first thing we do when we get on stage is to explain the culture and the rules of engagement. In other words, we train our audience.We do this right at the start of our opening bid, which is highly interactive and more akin to stand-up comedy. It’s where we let people know how the show is going to go. We communicate our style and form of entertainment, which is individual to each performer. And we do the same in our email marketing, which is why we talk about how important it is to tell your audience how often you're going to email them and what they can expect from you, for example. Tell them if they can reply - and of course, we encourage that.In our Getting to Know You sequence (i.e. our welcome sequence) we ask a question that gets people to reply. And we also include a link (or several) in every email we send. Because this teaches our audience that every time they click on a link in one of our emails, they get rewarded with something valuable.  Whatever you do (or don’t do) in your email trains your audience into specific behaviours - whether you're doing this consciously or not. Are these behaviours serving you (and your audience) in a positive way? Because if they're not, you may be stopping people from getting value from what you do. So become aware of what you’re training your audience to do.2. Create authorityAnother important email marketing strategy example we want to share is creating authority. As entertainers, sometimes we go on stage to perform in front of a group of people who don’t know who we are or whether we’re any good. People have to believe that we can deliver the show that’s been promised - that we can do what we said and that it's going to work. And in order to achieve that, we need to create authority. Of course, there's some natural authority that comes with the framing of the show. People spent money to buy a ticket and come to the show so they already assume (to a degree) that it’s going to work.Now if you translate that into the email marketing world, the fact that someone set up a business with a website where you can subscribe to their email list already creates some sense of authority. But above and beyond that, you want to show people what you’ve done before and what you could do for them. On stage, we do this with footage and clips from previous shows that prove that we can do what we say we do. But remember it’s important to create authority by giving proof or evidence that working with you is going to be worth their time.3. Grab people's attention The next thing you want to do is ensure you have the attention of your audience. This is true on stage but also in your email marketing. If you don't have people's attention at the beginning of the show or at the start of your relationship with your subscribers, they’re going to talk all the way through (at a show) or not pay attention. And you don't want that - you want their attention.So how do you do it? First of all, you show up with something that’s attention-grabbing. In the world of email marketing, this is done by giving people a promise when they first opt-in and making sure you deliver on that promise. And the first thing you have to always deliver on is your name - it needs to be the same whose list people subscribed to. We see that mistake a lot with business owners using a different name in their emails compared to what they have on their website.4. Generate engagement and keep people's attentionAnother one of our email marketing strategy examples we want to share is to grab and keep attention through subject lines, for example. They set an expectation, they grab someone's attention right from the start, and they help you keep it. When it comes to our shows, for example, we keep people’s attention by making sure our events are fast-paced and interesting. If we used a boring, corporate voice with no personality, people’s attention would immediately drop.So keep it pacey, get to the point, stop waffling, and don’t give people too many things to think about at once. That’s why we suggest  you don’t put too many points or offers in one email - one email is one offer, just like on stage you give one instruction at the time. Otherwise, it gets confusing and people can’t keep up or remember, so they don’t do anything. It's about being clear in your instructions to keep people engaged.5. Be yourselfThis is a contentious subject in the world of entertainment these days, but you're the one on stage, and it's your show. So within the confines of what’s acceptable, tell the jokes you want to tell. And if people don’t like them, that’s fine. They don’t have to buy tickets and come and watch you. It's okay to polarise people. In fact, if you're not making an attempt to make your stuff disliked by some people, you probably don’t have a tight enough angle - and you definitely want one. Even within the culture of cancelled entertainment, we still want to be ourselves and do a show that’s enjoyable for us. We want to be able to tell the jokes that we want to tell and write the emails that we want to send. Because if you compromise on that, you’ll end up with a show (or a business) that you don’t actually like! We say this all the time – we’d rather not have our business, podcast, or membership The League  if it meant we’d have to be boring and corporate. If we couldn't be ourselves and had to behave differently, we wouldn’t want to do it. This is who we are, and we love to create content that we would like to consume, which is what we suggest you do too. 6. Surprise your audienceIf you’re always doing the same thing and what you say, do, or write, is very formulaic, then you won’t keep people engaged. And also, you won’t be able to create an emotional response. For example, during his show, Kennedy might ask someone to take out their phone, find a photo, and look at it. And then Kennedy will start describing that photo. By the end of that segment, people will be amazed, but the reality is that the audience can tell where that is going. They know what he's going to do when he first asks someone to pick a photo. There’s no element of surprise there because the ending is implied in the setup. But if at the end of the show Kennedy tells that person what photo they almost picked, then there’s a surprise!And surprises are great at energising people. They set off different neurotransmitters in your brain that get you re-engaged or hyper-engaged. So think about sending pieces of content that are surprising and not what people expect. That’s why we often use elements of surprise and funny quirky analogies when writing our emails. How can you surprise your audience? Could you offer something for free, for example? 7. Tell storiesAnother one of our email marketing strategy examples taken from our shows is to tell stories. Rob, for example, will paint a picture and create a story to give people suggestions about what he's asking them to do. He talks them through the narrative of a story so they can paint that picture in their brain. And he does it that way because stories allow people to make connections that are emotional, real, and interesting.For example, you could build stories around how your product or service was created, how it can be used, or how it should never be used (that would be interesting!). Or maybe you could create a story around why your business is more credible than others.As entertainers, we use stories to get people to emotionally buy into what we’re about to demonstrate on stage. So if you want to do the same, show them something or let them see something in your business.8. Create a setup & payoff situationAnother strategy we use in our entertainment careers is to set something up and then make sure there’s always a payoff. So if Kennedy tells his audience to think of a card from a deck, for example, at some point he has to tell the person what card they picked. If he forgets or can’t figure out what the card is, there’s no payoff to that segment. And people need the payoff! If a magician makes something disappear, they also have to make it re-appear. Otherwise, it’s an incomplete loop in people’s minds!In the world of email marketing, that means that if you say something, you have to deliver on that. If you tell people you have a free workshop, it has to happen. And it has to be free! If not, people don't get their payoff. And when people don't get that, they stop buying into the setup. You need that buy-in because it's what gets people excited. So make your payoff clear and then make sure it always happens - without exceptions.9. Build beliefsWe talked about this before, but building beliefs is essential - both on stage and with your email marketing. This is definitely one of the email marketing strategy examples we stand by because, on stage, people need to believe that we can do what we said we’d do and that it’s going to be enjoyable. We do that by demonstrating, proving, and showing people what things we’ve done in the past. But we also build beliefs by sharing stories and dropping hints. So make sure you do the same in your email marketing. 10. Adapt and adjust the way you treat peopleDuring our shows, we 'read' people - we have to figure them out. And then we adjust our behaviours accordingly. That means we treat people in different ways depending on how they act. For example, Rob will need to always adjust the language pattern he uses to hypnotise someone based on signals he reads from a person. So he'll observe how they sit, how they engage with him, where they're looking, etc. And Kennedy will ask someone from the audience coming up on stage all sorts of questions. Why? To see how they behave on stage. Then based on their reactions, he'll use different techniques to either figure out or influence what they're thinking. How does this relate to your email marketing? In your email marketing, you should collect lots of data points about your subscribers, including how they came into your world. Because that gives you information about them and what they're interested in. Pay attention to what they engage with or what they click on. Trust what people do - not what people say. And then adjust your behaviours accordingly. If you have a subscriber who always watches videos, for example, send them an offer via video. Or if they always engage with a certain topic, send them more content that seems important to them. Read people, figure out data points, and then adjust your behaviours based on theirs. 11. Find the most efficient ways to do thingsAnother one of our email marketing strategy examples is to find the most efficient ways to do things. So if Rob is hypnotising someone, the process needs to be interesting and engaging. Otherwise, his audience is going to switch off and stop paying attention. The same happens with Kennedy in his shows. If he’s not using the most efficient route to get to an answer and is taking too long, then people are going to get bored. So we’re always looking for interesting shortcuts and tricks to speed up our processes and for efficient ways to get in front of an existing audience to get extra attention. 12. Pay attention to language patternsAnd finally, the last of our email marketing strategy examples from our on-stage career is to pay attention to language patterns. Why is this important? Because it helps you influence people. We have a full programme called Remote Control Persuasion, which is all about that. But the idea is that whenever you're communicating (whether it's through typing or speaking the words), it’s about knowing that some words are going to be more impactful and influence others while other words will do the opposite. So start looking at your language. Are you helping people with what you’re saying? Are you moving your audience towards where you want them? Or are you saying negative things that make them go round in circles? Everything you do and say in your emails (including the language you use) has an influence. Because we emotionally buy into the words that people use. So you want to make sure you’re using language that nudges people in the right direction. And changing little words every now and then makes a difference.Did you enjoy the 12 email marketing strategy examples we shared with you today? Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “was $499 (now FREE)”. This is something you can use if you have a discount or if you're introducing a before and after price or offer. Or you could say something along the lines of “today it’s $29. Tomorrow, it's $499”. This tells the whole story in the subject line, but people still need to open the email and click on the links to grab the offer.So it's something you can use on the last day when an offer is about to close, for example. This subject line was from the opening email of one of our campaigns, but we also used it as the closing one. It works well for demonstrating and telling the whole story in a short subject line and encouraging people to act now.Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesMaking Yourself Choosable with Belinda Weaver.The Little-Known Right Order to Make Your Offers (For Maximum Sales).9 Psychological Things That We Use In All Of Our Campaigns.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. Join our FREE Facebook groupIf you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The League MembershipNot sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the 12 email marketing strategy examples that we use on stage) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review...

How do you make sure you get better results, more engagement, and more sales using email marketing campaigns? You need to understand the psychology of marketing.We’re Kennedy and Fifi, and today we're going to share the 9 psychological strategies that we successfully use in all our email marketing campaigns.Ready to discover all our best secrets?Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow To Use Summits To Get Visible (Even If You’re An Introvert) And Build Your Email List, With Fifi Mason.Useful Strategies To Stop Procrastinating RIGHT NOW To Get Your Email Marketing Done!How To Build The Most Impactful Email Marketing Strategy Plan To Make More Sales In Your Business.FREE list to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. Here's a list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here.Join the FREE Facebook groupDo you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber? There's a way! Every business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. You'll find a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This content is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The Email Hero Blueprint Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.Want to connect with Fifi?Fifi is a personal brand and visibility coach who works primarily with introverted coaches and impact makers. She helps quieter people - those who have ideas they want to share with the world but struggle to put them out there. Fifi empowers them to find a way to share in a way that aligns with who they are. You can find Fifi on her website.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the biggest mistakes you're making with your email automation strategy) and love the show, we'd appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast.And please do tell us! What do you really fill your working days with if you don't spend time on email marketing? We'd love to know!

Do you have a flagship product - a core product or service that you focus on with your marketing and your messaging? Today we're sharing how you decide in what order to promote your products so you can simplify your business and your marketing and maximise your sales per subscriber. Sounds too good to be true? Well, it's a really simple trick, and you're just about to learn all there is about it! Ready? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (4:43) All roads lead to Rome!(7:21) Choosing your Rome.(9:34) Create offers that appeal to different segments of your audience.(10:40) Reduce the risk and deliver results to prove you can help.(11:46) Bring more eyeballs to your core product.(13:09) Simplify your business and maximise your profits.(14:56) How to structure your email marketing.(16:29) Talk about your offers in different ways.(18:04) How to pick your flagship product.(21:20) Subject line of the week.All roads lead to Rome! In a casual, throwaway comment we shared during our Level Up mastermind in London, we said that all businesses need to have a core product and all roads must lead to it. It's like the old well-known expression that all roads lead to Rome! This was hands down the biggest takeaway from our participants, and it's an idea that we often take for granted but want to shed some light on because it might help you solve some of the problems you're currently experiencing in your business. When using our email campaigns, a lot of people ask us in what order they should sell their products and to whom. If you sell a couple of different products in your business and have a few lead magnets as well, you have to juggle different offers. So how do you know how they all fit together?The great news is that there's an easy answer to this. You need to pick the one thing that you ultimately want everybody in your world to end up in. For us, it’s our membership, The League. Interestingly, what you choose as 'your Rome' doesn’t have to be your highest-priced product. For example, our email writing agency or our mastermind Level Up cost more than The League. But those are what we call our profit maximisers or upsell offers. They are products we make available for the people who want further help from us (more about that later). So to help you figure out what your Rome is, finish the sentence, “If I could wave a magic wand and get everyone single one of my perfect customers to buy one thing from me, it would be ............”.Choosing your RomeOur Rome is our membership because with our more expensive products we have a capacity issue. In our mastermind, we only have two groups of 15 people, for example. So we don’t want every single one of our ideal customers to end up there – that’s just not possible! But with our membership, we can have as many members as we want because it’s a scalable offer. In other words, having more people inside The League won’t diminish our ability to deliver. That's why our membership is our Rome, and everything leads to that. Bringing people closer to our Rome (our flagship product) is our ultimate goal.So that's what you want to do too – figure out what your Rome is and then lead people to it. Because if your marketing isn’t doing that, it’s probably confusing people and pushing them away. Once you have one focal point in your business, your customers will see that too. But if you have loads of different offers, it’s hard for people to figure out what’s right for them. They can get confused.It's okay to have different products that will bring in people at different points and help them with various parts of their journey. But ultimately you want one core offer - something you’re driving everyone to. That will be your focal point - your North Star. So every time you’re creating a new piece of content, a new offer, or setting up an email campaign, you want to first figure out how that activity helps you to get more of your ideal clients closer to buying your core offer.Create offers that appeal to different segments of your audienceOnce you've picked your Rome, look at everything else you're doing to see if your other activities or offers act as a ramp towards your Rome. Do they move people towards your core offer? Everything you do in your business and your marketing needs to act as a precursor or prequel to the one thing you want to sell. In order to achieve that, you want to create things that appeal to different segments of your audience. For example, in our business, we might create a piece of content that only appeals to course creators. And then we'll have something separate for membership site owners or coaches. These are all micro products, and they can be free or paid for, but the key is that they lead into the core product. So create on-ramp products or offers that appeal to different segments and lead to your Rome.Reduce the risk and deliver results to prove you can helpOn-ramp offers can also be useful to help you reduce the risk for potential new customers who are on the fence about buying your flagship product. In other words, you can use on-ramp products to make your Rome either lower price or lower commitment. Can you think of ways to reduce the level of perceived commitment?Another thing you can do is to deliver some kind of result to prove that you can help people. We currently live in a world with the highest levels of skepticism and lowest levels of trust ever in the history of the human race. People might not want to commit to you just yet. So it's key for you to be able to deliver some small result – something that proves that you're good and that your product or service works. Can your on-ramp offers do that?Bring more eyeballs to your core productAnd finally, on-ramp offers can be tied to some kind of traffic method that brings more eyeballs to your flagship product. For example, we only have affiliate programmes (where we pay people a commission for selling our products) for our on-ramp offers. We don’t have an affiliate programme for our Rome – The League. And that’s because we know that by running affiliate programmes for our on-ramp offers we get more people to run promotions for us and therefore more ideal customers to see our Rome.For example, in our online email marketing conference - Inbox - we had presentations about lots of different topics. And those will appeal to different segments of our audience. The business model for our event reduces risk because Inbox is free to attend. You pay nothing upfront and only spend money if you want to buy the recordings. So we deliver results for people. Because people take the teachings, apply them to their business, and make money. Plus, all our speakers promote the event to their lists and bring more subscribers to our world from their audiences.Simplify your business and maximise your profitsSo, to summarise, when looking at any other offers you run in your business, check whether they are on-ramp products that move people closer to your flagship product. If not, are they profit maximisers, like our writing agency or our mastermind? If you have anything else that doesn't fall into these categories, are those things just a distraction? Because something that doesn't help people come into your ecosystem by getting closer to your Rome or isn't a profit maximiser isn't needed. So get rid of it and simplify your business - not just for you but for your subscribers too.When someone new comes into your world, the undertone of everything you say is that ultimately they should end up in your Rome. And if people want to dip their toe in the water with you first and find out if you’re any good and can get results for people, you'll have other lower-commitment offers that are either free or paid for. Look at what we do – yes, we talk about our membership The League a lot, but every now and then we also tell people about other things we’re doing. We give people lots of different opportunities to try some of our products.How to structure your email marketingOnce you've set things up in your business this way, you can also figure out how to order your campaigns in your email marketing engine and create your ideal subscriber journey.When someone new comes into your world, you want to put them through the Getting to Know You sequence (that's what we call our welcome sequence). And then after that, you have a string of campaigns designed to sell your core product and tell people why it’s good, why they should buy it, and why they should buy it now. Some people will buy, but those who don't will receive new campaigns (coupled with your daily emails) where you offer them your lower-commitment products.So if join our list as a new email subscriber you go through a series of campaigns about The League, which we believe is the best thing you can do for your email marketing. But if you get to the end of our engine, and you're still not ready to join, then we can help you with other products (i.e. our on-ramp offers). For example, we can sell you our List Building course or our Bottomless Email Strategy (which is included inside our membership, by the way). And a lot of people who start off with these products do end up in The League because we’ve proven to them that we can help. Talk about your offers in different waysSo, picking your flagship product and deciding that everything in your marketing leads to that helps you simplify your email marketing and your business. You can wrap multiple offers and campaigns around your flagship product and then talk about it in different ways. You can highlight different aspects of your product that will appeal to different people. What you don’t want to do is to talk about different products every month. Because that’s a sure way to confuse your list and make no sales! A confused mind cannot make decisions, and if you continuously promote different products, your audience won't be able to tell the difference. They won't know what's available or what they should buy to solve the problem they have. But when you have one Rome, there’s no confusion. So stick with your one thing and talk about it from different angles to make sure you continue to build the beliefs, the understanding, and the desire for your core product.How to pick your flagship productSo what types of products would make for a good Rome? You have many options here, but here are the core ones. High-ticket coaching programme. Think 12 weeks, or 6-12 months, for example. Mastermind. Membership. This is what we chose to do because we wanted a subscription we could scale. But even if you sell physical products, you could have a business model that encourages people to buy from you every month.Flagship course or programme.A live event you do once a year.Once you've decided what your Rome is, you can add other offers for the people who want to get even closer to you (i.e. the profit maximisers). Remember, you’re not trying to sell those to everyone – they are offers for the people who want more help from you. We created our mastermind at the back of people who wanted to spend more time with us to get some help with more than just email marketing.So if you want to find out more about our world, go and check out our Rome – The League. And as for our mastermind, Level Up, we don't have any availability right now (August 2022). But we’ll be opening up some slots in the future. So if you want to register your interest and go on the waiting list, the link is here.Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “what’s your face doing?” followed by the confused face emoji. This works because it's a curiosity-driven subject line - people can't tell what it's going to be about. Will it be an insult? It’s a weird question to ask and totally driven by curiosity. Try it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesWhy We Started an Email Marketing Agency. How To Do Your Email Marketing While You’re On Holiday.Lessons Learned from Running Our 2-Day INBOX Event.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. Join our FREE Facebook groupIf you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The League MembershipNot sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how to pick a flagship product and order offers in your business to maximise sales) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

Are you thinking of running your own online summit? Are you wondering about how to promote a virtual event with email marketing?Today we're sharing the lessons we've learned from running our own two-day online event - Inbox. This is the third year we hosted our signature email marketing conference, which is a totally free online event with multiple speakers and a ton of value. Want to know all about it so you can find out exactly what email campaigns you can run to make your next online event a super profitable one? Then let's go! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (5:03) Why the online online virtual summit business model works.(6:49) Why we choose to run Inbox on Zoom.(8:00) Agree with the speakers when they're going to promote the event.(9:53) Find sponsors for your event. (10:56) Promote your event with email marketing. (12:39) The registration sequence and the engagement sequence. (16:06) The sequence you run during the event and the post-event sequence.(20:07) How to handle the price hikes.(25:51) Check out our Virtual Summit email campaign workshop.(29:06) Subject line of the week.Why the online virtual summit business model worksOur Inbox email marketing conference is now online, which means people can attend from all over the world. But when we first ran the event in 2020 it wasn't meant to be free or online. We'd planned an in-person conference in Newcastle for $500 per ticket. But then the pandemic hit, and we had to move the event online. We've basically changed the business model so that instead of having people pay for a ticket, they pay for the recordings of all the sessions (we call this All Access Pass). Plus, because all the speakers also promote the event to their audiences (and earn a percentage of the sales), an online event like this is a great list-building exercise. We absolutely fell in love with this business model, and to this date, our conference Inbox creates the biggest influx of brand new subscribers to our list each year. Why we choose to run Inbox on Zoom One of the things we learned is that although there are different platforms designed to host virtual events (and those are absolutely brilliant) sometimes tech barriers stop people from attending. So we decided to host our event on Zoom, and we have no intention of ever changing that. Because running a virtual summit is a list-building exercise, you want lots of attendees! So it's probably not the right time to try out fancy platforms that people aren't familiar with because there can be a lot of resistance to those. Whereas with Zoom, pretty much everyone knows how to use it, so if you remove the tech resistance you'll have more people registering and attending the event. Agree with the speakers when they're going to promote the event Another thing we learned is that not all businesses treat email marketing as a priority in their business. So while we know in advance what we're going to promote and when, a lot of businesses might not. During the first year of running Inbox, we asked all speakers to promote the event to their list, but we didn't specify any timelines for them. And that meant that we got very little (if any) promotion at all from some of the speakers. So what we do now is to ask the speakers to specify in advance what dates they're going to promote the event. We ask them to create a schedule, put it in their calendars, and commit to it. So if you're organising an online event, don’t be afraid of letting your speakers know that it works as a collective. If all the speakers promote the conference to their list, then you’re getting in front of all of their audiences. But if they don't, then you don't get as much exposure - you all have to do the promotion. Find sponsors for your eventAnother tip we can give you is to try and find companies that are happy to pay to get in front of your audience (because they're their ideal clients too) and offer them a sponsorship package. This means you'll have other businesses advertise at your event and pay a fee to be able to do so.The sponsorship fee could be any amount and might depend on the scale of your event, but it gives those sponsors a good potential for return. And for you, having sponsors means additional revenue. We suggest you put different sponsorship packages together and let your sponsors know what they get for paying different amounts. That way, you allow businesses at different levels to put their message in front of your audience. Promote your event with email marketing Another tip we have for you if you're running your own virtual summit is to use a few short email campaigns to promote it. Inside our membership The League we have different campaigns that are perfect if you're hosting a big, expensive, in-person event. But for a free online event, we use and recommend four email sequences.A summit is a list-building event, but it's also a money-making opportunity. So you're leaving money on the table if you don't try to at least make half the sales yourself. Because of course, you can rely on speakers promoting the event, but you’ve got a list too! And in fact, you have the most engaged and responsive list of people who are interested in your brand and what you sell.So don’t make the mistake of abandoning your list. You want your event to turn into a cash-generation activity too, and the following four email campaigns are going to help you maximise your sales.1. The registration sequenceThe first email campaign we run is a registration sequence. This goes out to your audience to get them to come and register for the free event. Ours is made up of 15 emails going out over 14 days (with two emails on the last day) and drives people to go and check out the sales page.And speaking of the sales page, let's remember that even though the event is free, you want to sell it! So imagine you’re putting together an event that’s thousands of dollars per ticket. Make a page that will sell that and then make it free - don't skimp out on the sales page just because it’s a free event.You want people who register to feel that this event is so good that they’re taking advantage of you by getting it for free. So when they find out that the session recordings are available to sell, they want to go and grab them!2. The engagement sequenceThe second sequence we use is a “show up” sequence to drive engagement. It's an important one because when people turn up at the event, watch the content and realise it's mind-blowing, and they can't take notes fast enough, or they can’t attend all the sessions because they have other commitments during the day, this sequence will drive people to go and buy your recordings.For this, we use a sequence of 5 emails over the course of 10 days leading up to the event. Remember that your emails shouldn't be boring - you need to include valuable content and position the event in such a way that will make people want to attend. Effectively, you want to re-sell people on the event even though it's free because you want them to show up. And you want to have an impact on people even if they decide not to buy the recordings.So even if someone decides to never buy our All Access Pass, we still want them to see how good the event is. Because later on, when they’re ready to think about email marketing, they’re going to think of us as the industry leaders for hosting such a great event. And by drumming up engagement, you're helping your speakers too. 3. The sequence you run during the event The third sequence is the one we run during the event. While Inbox is running, each morning we send out an email that explains what's happening in the morning sessions. And then we do the same in the afternoon. Because we run a two-day event, that's a short sequence of four emails.  In the first year of running Inbox, we would send out an email every hour. But we soon learned that our subscribers didn't like that - way too many emails in a day! So we don't suggest you do that. 4. The post-event sequenceThe fourth email sequence is a post-event sequence. In ours, we send a feedback survey to help us improve the event, and that’s how we learn about what people like. As the founders of Response Suite, we are big fans of surveys and use them a lot in our business. Something key that we do in our online conference is to set different prices for the recordings, and typically the price for our All Access Pass goes up by five times 2-3 days after the event. So we use our post-event email sequence to remind people of the price hike and compel them to buy now.As you've probably figured out by now, three-quarters of the sequences we send out have the primary goal of pushing engagement and selling the recordings. So it’s not just about building your list from the event - remember you want to make it profitable too!After registration, we have a window where people can get the recordings for a ridiculously cheap price. And we sell a few All Access Passes at that price, but we sell as many (if not more dollars’ worth) at the higher price point. And that’s because not everyone trusts the value of the event to buy immediately or beforehand. But also, not everyone is necessarily looking at a decent return on their money – they'd rather have a decent return on their time. So they’re happy to spend more money once they’ve seen some of the event or have worked out that they want to go back and watch the sessions later on.So don’t leave money on the table – put these sequences in place and remind people that the recordings are available. How to handle the price hikesWe mentioned earlier that we have a window after registration when the All Access Pass is super cheap. We call this the 20-minute fast-action discounted price, and that’s available to someone immediately after they register. That price will automatically expire 20 minutes after registration. To do this, we use a tool called Countdown Hero, which is part of our Automate Hero tool - something we include for free in our membership, The League.For the 20-minute fast-action discount, we also ask some of the speakers to add some bonuses - something that gives them more eyeballs on their content. So this increases and grows the value of the All Access Pass. But also, if the speakers recommend the event to their list, people are more likely to buy the recordings at a super discounted price. The speakers get a percentage of those sales via their affiliate link, so you increase your conversions while the speaker increases their commissions. It's a win from both angles!After the 20 minutes have expired, the Early Bird price kicks in, and that’s available until the event starts. After that, you sell at the Regular price, which is obviously higher than the Early Bird. So in your pre-event emails, make sure you remind people about the price hike to give them a chance to buy at the Early Bird price. And during the event, keep reminding people they can buy at the Regular price before the price goes up afterwards.  Using conditional contentOf course, for people who have already bought the All Access Pass, we suggest you use conditional content. This is a feature that all email platforms will have which allows you to segment those subscribers who have already bought the All Access Pass. And instead of telling them about the price hikes, you simply re-sell them on the valuable content they already have access to.Check out our Virtual Summit Email Campaign WorkshopUsing these automated email campaigns to promote your virtual summit or online event is great because once you've set them up, you can run your event regularly. You only need to change the dates or any other details. That's what we do. And just like that, you're ready to roll out again. For us, getting ready for Inbox 2022 took about 10% less time than it took us the previous year because all our campaigns were already in place.But if you want to do this quickly and efficiently the first time you run your own online event, we have something for you. You can use the exact emails we used over the last few years of running Inbox because we are teaching a Virtual Summit Email Campaign Workshop on Wednesday, the 17th of August 2022.We teach all the campaigns we went through here today and unpick the psychology of why every word in those emails helps you get more people to register so you can grow your list and get them to buy the recordings so you can make the event profitable. Not only do you get all the teaching, but we also give you a Google document with every email for you to copy and paste, and send out when you run your online event. You also get a free account to our tool Countdown Hero, so you can create automatically expiring countdowns.So go and check out this link to join The League and attend the Virtual Summit Campaign Workshop. And once you signed up, you’ll also get the recording for that session if you can’t attend live.Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “what’s your face doing?” followed by the confused face emoji. This works because it's a curiosity-driven subject line - people can't tell what it's going to be about. Will it be an insult? It’s a weird question to ask and totally driven by curiosityUseful Episode ResourcesRelated episodes9 Lessons from The Inbox Online Email Marketing Conference.Why You Might Want to Think Twice About Consumption Emails.7 Essential Email Campaigns Examples For Your Business.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. Join our FREE Facebook groupIf you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The League MembershipNot sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how to promote a virtual event with email marketing) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

How do you know if you're unique enough? What makes you stand out? How do you market yourself so that your ideal customers choose you and not your competitors? These are some of the questions we answer today with the help of our awesome guest Belinda Weaver. Belinda is a copywriter who helps people who are learning to be copywriters to up their game. And today she talks to us about how to make yourself choosable. Yep - that's a word. And you sure want to find out all about it! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:10) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(3:50) Did Belinda really have a pet peacock called Cocker?(5:10) Do you really need a USP to stand out from the crowd?(7:20) No USP? No problem!(8:45) How do you make yourself more choosable?(10:00) Lean into the combination of ingredients that makes you unique.(13:06) Tell people what it's like to work with you.(16:44) Share your passion and why you got started. (18:52) Be yourself and don't be afraid of feedback.(23:02) Subject line of the week with Belinda Weaver.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. Do you really need a USP to stand out from the crowd? As business owners, we all worry about the idea of standing out. Why should people choose you? Do we worry too much about this? Is this a valid concern? Our friend and awesome copywriter Belinda Weaver shared with us that having a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is indeed Marketing 101. We're told to come up with our USP and our differentiator and to have a great elevator pitch that explains what we do, who we do it for, and what makes us different. These kinds of things are drummed into us. And Belinda calls this the unicorn fallacy. It's this idea that in order to be successful, you have to be unique and different. But when she first started out as a copywriter, Belinda didn’t know what made her unique yet. So instead of trying to focus too much on that, she decided to become as good as she could be and then figure out what made her unique. And she thinks a lot of business owners should do the same. As a copywriter, Belinda always asks her clients what makes them unique. And funnily enough, she never expects a great answer because she doesn’t have a great one herself! In fact, at first, she thought there was nothing in particular that made her unique. But she kept showing up, earning an income, and making progress. And at some point, she realised that maybe she didn’t have to be different in order to be successful.No USP? No problem!Is anything ever unique anyway? Even if you invented something brand new, is it going to be unique for long? According to Belinda, having a USP isn’t completely irrelevant. We probably all have something that’s uniquely and brilliantly us, but if the USP becomes a gimmick that holds us back from what's important, then it’s not useful.If we get paralysed in trying to find our USP and don’t do the things we could be doing to get more business, then there's no point in finding a USP in the first place! We sometimes get so worried about what makes us different, unique, special, or rockstar-worthy that we do nothing. And that's not cool.  How do you make yourself more choosable? Making yourself choosable isn't just about standing out from your competitors. Yes, there are people who do the same thing as you, but there are often different solutions to similar problems - alternative routes we could take and different types of businesses we could use. So what can we actually do to make ourselves more choosable?Belinda tells us it all starts with the idea that you don’t have to be unique. The best in the market isn’t always the favourite. So instead, try and get in front of people and become their favourite. Because what we do as buyers is make decisions on who we choose. We don’t want to look at the whole Internet. We want a short list, which is often made of the people we know. Consumers are always trying to cut their choices down, so send out signals in your marketing to help you become people’s favourite.Why you need to share reviews and testimonialsAs buyers, we want to know that you, as a business, are capable of solving the problem we have – that you've done it before and can do what you say you do. So how do we know? We know because you’ve done it for other people and you did it well enough to get reviews and testimonials.And also that you’re not a complete twat to work with! That can be the difference, and it's how you become someone's favourite. However, according to Belinda, that's an area a lot of people shy away from. So show that you can solve a problem, that you’ve done it for others, and let them see what it’s like to work with you as a human. Because when you do these things on a regular basis people start to know, like, and trust you. And that’s what makes you choosable - you don't have to be totally unique and not even the best! Lean into the combination of ingredients that makes you uniqueIf you look at most businesses, a lot of them aren’t unique at all. We all use the same ingredients. But a business is like a cocktail, and it’s the combination of the ingredients that makes it unique. So in Belinda’s case, it’s the fact that she’s a copywriter from Australia who lives in the States and that she set up her business to have the flexibility to raise a family, which she now has. Her work revolves around her children and her pug. Some of these things might not sound relevant initially, but this is the unique cocktail that makes Belinda choosable. This is what makes her distinguishable, especially when it comes to courses and memberships. Because Belinda certainly isn’t the only copywriter who offers copywriting courses and a coaching membership. But even if someone is a leader in a particular space or industry and you don’t like them or the way they portray themselves, you’re not going to want to work with them. Personality really comes into play too! Tell people what it's like to work with youAccording to Belinda, there are more elements that should come into your marketing and that a lot of businesses overlook.  Something crucial you want to be doing is explaining what happens once someone joins your programme and what the process of working with you looks like. Also, don't forget to share reviews, testimonials, and credibility markers all the time.Why? Because these are the things that make buyers feel safe with you. As consumers, we all have this natural anxiety when we make a decision. What is going to happen next? So let people know what happens when you start working together and give them proof that you’ve done it for others. That makes them feel safe and certain, which can be a great way to get people to choose you.Take care of all these things first and then the swaying point, if all things are equal, is about whether people enjoy hanging out with you. Do they respect you? That can be a huge influence on someone making decisions, but only as long as you’ve taken care of the other elements first. And if you do that consistently, people get to trust you and know you. So the likability factor is the tipping point.This is something we do too for our own membership, The League. We give a video tour to our new members so they know what's involved, and how to navigate the content and find their way around. This definitely helps people overcome certain objections, and Belinda explains it’s about shifting a lot of the information we reserve for people who have bought from us to our prospective buyers.Why? Because that's what gives them the roadmap of working with you, especially if you're someone who does launch marketing. It's about pulling a lot of the content that we normally keep behind the paywall into your pre-launch material. That works because it allows you to show people what happens when they join, and that helps them feel safe. Share your passion and why you got startedAnother thing we can do to make ourselves choosable is to share our passion and why we got started. Belinda, for example, became a copywriter before she had kids because she wanted a family-friendly business. A lot of her business journey is getting it all done around two kids and a pug, and she shares a lot of that in her marketing and her emails.As a result, a lot of the stories she tells attract people who feel Belinda understands what it’s like to be them. By bringing her passions and why she started into her marketing, she's able to make strong connection points with her audience.There are also other more frivolous things she shares - such as what she enjoys in life (whether it's tea or coffee or her favourite TV show). Belinda calls these Velcro hooks, and the more of these you share, the stronger the connection with your audience is because we continuously build that know, like, and trust factor.So we don’t wait until we launch.  In fact, when we send our big, long pre-launch email campaign, people are ready to sign up. Because they've already decided they like us and want to work with us. They've already chosen us. Be yourself and don't be afraid of feedbackOf course, it goes without saying that for every person who chooses you, there are going to be people who don’t. Belinda believes there’s a vibe for every tribe, and for everyone who does like you, there will be people who don’t. And we have to be okay with that.In all honesty, this bothered Belinda when she first started - she thought she had to be "professional" and never alienate people. But after a couple of years, she realised she was making herself too vanilla and not interesting to those who would be interested. So she started leaning into who she is by being herself more. Because you don’t have to keep up a façade.And when she started being more herself, she got a much greater response. Yes, there are other courses and memberships out there, and some people are going to choose those instead of you. And that’s fine. But if you water down or lose the things that make you you, then you’re going to lose everyone. It’s best to have people who really dig you than to be bland as all hell.And sure, you'll get feedback. Some of it will be great and say that you're the best thing ever. When that happens, it means you've created what we call the environment of zero competition, where nobody else has that unique recipe. And that's because your personality, your offer, your history, your fee, your services, etc. are unique to you. But you’ll also get negative feedback and people who will say they'll never buy from you - for whatever reason. Don't be afraid of negative feedback. If you're going to put yourself out there, you have to get tougher skin. There are people who feel it’s okay to say rude things to you, and you have to learn to ignore them.That doesn’t mean you’re not going to read some of those comments sometimes and end up questioning everything you’re doing. But you have to build your muscles to bless and release - catch that narrative and let it go. Because the more you concentrate on negative feedback, the less you focus on the people who are actively interested in what you do. So bless and release, and move on.We hope you take this as permission to go out and be yourself, do the best work you can, and deliver more of yourself in everything you do so you can attract the tribe that is right for you. Subject line of the week with Belinda WeaverBelinda has not one but two subject lines for us! Her best-performing subject line is super straightforward: “The Copywriting Incubator. I have news”. The Copywriting Incubator is the name of Belinda’s programme, and this subject line works for her as it literally labels the content of her email - a practice Belinda swears by.  Because she believes we don't open emails when the subject line is mysterious.  But Belinda’s favourite subject line is “Quick question” which contains a 9-word question that usually re-engages people. Belinda likes this one because when you’re looking at your inbox you don’t want to see emails that need a 20-minute reply, do you? You want something you can quickly answer so you can then get out of your inbox. So this subject line lets people know that this is going to be super fast, and it works because Belinda is only asking for a few seconds of your time.Useful Episode ResourcesAbout BelindaIf you want to find out more about Belinda you can find her on her website. And if you’re a copywriter, she has a quiz that tells you the one focus you need to have to accelerate your copywriting business.Related episodesThe Therapeutic Benefits of Writing Your Own Emails.Little Tricks to Write Better Emails That Aren’t Boring. Why We Waited 3 Years Before Creating a Brand.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. Join our FREE Facebook groupIf you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The League MembershipNot sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how to market yourself to make yourself choosable) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!